The internet functions across the world thanks to what you can think of as a consistent internal grammar—a set of basic rules governing the organization and presentation of information, so that every part of the system is able to communicate successfully with every other part. One of the most fundamental and familiar parts of this grammar is the Domain Name System, or DNS.
It’s this system that allows us humans to give recognizable names—from www.bbc.com to tomchatfield.net—to different online resources, not to mention organizing these resources into a strict, coherent global hierarchy. This system is also, however, a largely unsung treasure-house of some of the most iconic new linguistic formulations to enter our world in the last half-century.
The word domain is a distinctly aristocratic one, entering English via Scottish in the fifteenth century from the Old French term demaine, meaning a lord’s estate; itself a word drawn from the Latin dominus, meaning lord or master. Domain names were first described in 1983 and revert nicely to this classical type. For while the technology itself is essentially a mnemonic, converting the abstraction of pure numbers into words and letters, it represents one of modernity’s most significant acts of naming: an almost universally accessible form of lordship, bringing with it mastery of one’s very virtual estate.
Like much of the digital world, domain names exist primarily to be read and written (or typed) rather than spoken—one interesting side-effect of which has been to train recent generations to speak their punctuation out loud. “Dot com” is such a standard turn of phrase it no longer seems odd, to the extent that it has now entered the language as a respectable noun for any online business.
Indeed, domains ending in “dot com” have a kind of blue chip reliability to them that still makes them the most desirable class of domain, even though the “.com” ending is just one among twenty-one generic “top level” domains. Others include the slightly esoteric “.info” and “.net”—and the recent explicit addition “.xxx,” for adult-themed content.
As of the start of 2016, the snappily named Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) oversaw over 1,200 top-level domains, including over 250 particular to different countries, one of which—“.tv,” belonging to the tiny Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu—represents a substantial proportion of the value of the island’s economy, thanks to its happy usefulness as the standard abbreviation for “television.” The island’s government rents out the right to supply .tv domain names to a private company for a lease worth millions of dollars.17
Spare a thought, finally, for those who have unintentionally fallen foul of the system. Once upon a time, for example, there was a service for helping you find a therapist called Therapist Finder, whose address www.therapistfinder could unfortunately be read in an entirely different sense.
Then there were the Mole Station Native Nursery, www.molestationnursery.com, eBay rival site Auctions Hit at www.auctionshit.com, and countless others—most of which no longer exist, save in the internet’s infinite memory.
As a modern art, domain naming may not be up there with other forms of creative writing, but it’s a vital verbal consideration nonetheless—and one most of us find ourselves reading, hearing or saying something about every single day.